Posted in: SERVO Blog (08/28 at 11:08 AM)

Researchers Hope to Mass-Produce Robots on a Chip

Tiny robots the size of a flea could one day be mass-produced, churned out in swarms and programmed for a variety of applications, such as surveillance, micromanufacturing, medicine, cleaning, and more. In an effort to reach this goal, a recent study has demonstrated the initial tests for fabricating microrobots on a large scale.

The researchers, from institutes in Sweden, Spain, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland, explain that their building approach marks a new paradigm of robot development in microrobotics. The technique involves integrating an entire robot - with communication, locomotion, energy storage, and electronics - in different modules on a single circuit board. In the past, the single-chip robot concept has presented significant limitations in design and manufacturing. However, instead of using solder to mount electrical components on a printed circuit board as in the conventional method, the researchers use conductive adhesive to attach the components to a double-sided flexible printed circuit board using surface mount technology. The circuit board is then folded to create a three-dimensional robot.

Comments

Mind/Iron

Eventually, someone is going to download some part of a human’s cerebral cortex into synthetic memory. That’s when it gets tricky. As dozens of science fiction authors have detailed, there are issues of rights, of enslavement, and no death to escape it all. Granted, there will be all sorts of social and political issues. For now, let’s look at what could possibly go wrong on the technological front.